Yesterday, I promised to tell you about a guy who became the most famous entertainer of his age via a series of challenges, dares, and contests.
A reader wrote in to guess who it might be. Is it Mr. Beast?
No.
I don’t know Mr. Beast from any other Mr. YouTube Star.
But I am sure the playbook I’m about to show you still works today, and maybe is what Mr. Beast used to get attention and success.
Let me get to our story. It takes place on November 22nd, many, many years ago.
A small, muscular man walked into the Gloucester, Massachusetts police station. And he asked to be chained up. In fact, he asked to be put into the most secure handcuffs the police had.
The man wasn’t crazy. He wasn’t dangerous. He hadn’t committed a crime.
Instead, this was a publicity stunt. His claim was that the police couldn’t hold him.
And sure enough, after the police cuffed him, the man got out of the cuffs, in just a few seconds’ time.
That man’s name?
Mr. Bea— no just kidding.
You’ve probably guessed it already. That man’s name was Harry Houdini.
Houdini was the biggest entertainer of his age. Even today, almost 100 years after his death, Houdini is still the famousest magician who ever lived. Most people, even if they know nothing about magic or Houdini’s stunts, at least know his name.
That time in Gloucester (the year was 1896) was the first time Houdini escaped from cuffs in a police station. But the scheme behind it was one he had used before and would use later, many times.
Houdini would challenge rivals to escape his handcuffs, and offer to pay them if they succeeded (they never could).
He’d put out ads in the newspaper, inviting strangers to come to his shows and get on stage, to cuff and chain and tie him as they pleased, and see if they could contain him (they never could).
He’d put himself in impossible situations — in a strait jacket, upside down, locked in a glass cage filled to the top with water, to see if maybe death could catch him (death did win out in the end, in 1926, via a burst appendix).
Many of Houdini’s stunts were very difficult and demanding to perform. Others were genuinely dangerous. But many were just show — planned, orchestrated, dependent on magician’s tricks to make them look daring and impossible.
The reality didn’t matter. The perception did. And the perception was that Houdini could get out of anything, escape any situation, no matter how desperate. He had demonstrated the fact dozens of times throughout his career. Incontestably. That’s why he went to the police station.
This email is getting long, and it’s about to get longer. Well, at least a bit longer.
Because I don’t want to just tell you about Harry Houdini and his “Challenge Playbook” of building a name for himself. I want you to think about how you could apply Houdini’s playbook to what you do.
After I read about Houdini, I thought about this question myself. I thought about challenges, dares, stunts for myself. Something that seemed risky, unlikely to succeed, costing me significantly if it failed.
I came up with ideas like this:
* Pay $1k for a 40-word classified ad — and make my money back on day 0
* Pay $2k and spend a week to attend a live event, totaling about $4k in real cost — and make that money back before the event is done
* Pay $10k to buy a newsletter in a niche where my good name counts for nothing, where I have no experience, and no particular affinity — and make a 100% return on my money within 3 months
… et cetera. The key is that the outcome be a yes/no achievement, an incontestable result, and something with a touch of risk and glamour — at least glamour as it is in the dollar-denominated online marketing space.
And of course, for any of this to make sense, I’d have to announce my challenge in public… draw out the uncertainty and high-stakes for as long as possible… and make a show out of my desperate and unlikely success, if it did happen.
Maybe my ideas gave you some ideas of your own.
If you do end up creating a daring stunt or challenge in your industry, let me know about it. I’d like to come and watch, and maybe I can even bring some friends to help build buzz in the audience.
But on to the sales end of this email:
You might wonder whether an email like the above is actually useful for selling.
The fact is, I don’t know.
I wrote the above because I felt like writing it, without much thinking about actually tying it into an offer.
That’s a privilege that I allow myself to indulge in sometimes, much like chocolate.
But it’s not something I encourage others to do. I encourage others to write deliberate emails, with deliberate goals — to make sales, to change beliefs in their prospects’ minds, to curate and condition their audience.
That’s what underlies the prompts I put inside my Daily Email Habit service. And in case you’re wondering, my email today and my email yesterday were not based on my own prompts.
But two days was enough of a holiday for me, so tomorrow I’ll get back to writing emails based on the Daily Email Habit prompt.
If you’d like to join me, sign up here before tomorrow’s prompt goes out at 12 midnight PST tonight: